


Wonky Compass

by RanjantheVictor



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, M/M, Overly complicated soulmate rules, Sonia Kaspbrak's A+ Parenting, Soulmate-Identifying Marks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-12
Updated: 2019-09-12
Packaged: 2020-10-17 08:03:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,558
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20617697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RanjantheVictor/pseuds/RanjantheVictor
Summary: Everyone has a soulmate, and everyone has a mark on their body hinting who that person could be. But marks and soulmates can change.For Eddie Kaspbrak, figuring it over the years can be quite a challenge.





	Wonky Compass

**Author's Note:**

> Because with Chapter 2 out, what the world really needs is yet another teenage Reddie soulmate au.

“Good morning class,” the round, red-faced pudgy woman says in a jammy voice. “My name is Mrs Butterfly, and can I just say how _lovely_ it is to see so many happy little children here, looking up at me with their bright little faces. I can already tell that we’re going to be the _best_ of friends.”

Six-year old Richie Tozier’s bright little face is in fact looking up at her with a look of profound distaste, like she’d just forced a Brussel sprout into his mouth and told him to suck on it, for he finds something deeply off-putting about the sickly-sweet woman.

Stanley Uris is wearing the same look of dry stoniness he’s perfected better than anyone who isn’t a 45-year old divorced DMV clerk.

Even Big Bill Denbrough was regarding her sceptically, wondering why their usual teacher had been replaced this morning by this stout dose of saccharine.

But five-year old Eddie Kaspbrak really _was_ looking up at her with a happy little face, because he finds the cloying sweetness comfortingly familiar, and thinks Mrs Butterfly might be the second nicest woman he’s ever met.

“I’m here to talk to you all bout something very important. Does anyone here, know what a soulmate is?” No-one raised their hand, some didn’t know and those that had heard the word before didn’t want to answer this patronising woman who treated them like little kids. They weren’t little kids anymore, they were big kids who went to school now and everything, they knew how to spell both _cat_ and _hat_ after all. Babytalk wasn’t to get anywhere with them.

“Well, a soulmate is something that everyone has. A soulmate is your _very special person_, a person who is special just for you. They will be your best friend for ever and ever, and will be your absolute favouritest person in the whole wide world. But how do you find this very special person I hear you ask?” Nobody has asked any such thing, but the class were at least paying attention now. 

“You have a tiny mark on your little body, a soulmark, that tell you who they are. But the mark isn’t just a name, like John or Jane or something, oh no, it’s not as easy as that!” she tittered, which didn’t make sense to the class, because reading names was _hard_ and not a subject worth tittering about.

“Instead the mark will be like a little clue, a hint about that special person. So if one of your friends has a pet bunny, and you have an ‘ickle rabbit on your leg, then maybe that friend is your very special soulmate! But to work that out you have to be little detectives and figure out the clues – isn’t that exciting girls and boys?” Eddie did think that was pretty exciting, he’d loving playing the detective last weekend when he, Richie, Stan and Bill had solved ‘The Case of the Missing Cupcakes’ (his mom had eaten them).

“But there’s the complicated part, so pay attention my poppets!” which the kids thought was a bit much. Firstly, they certainly weren’t poppets, whatever they were, and secondly, this was an awful lot of information to absorb before naptime. “Who your soulmate is may _change_. So if you stop spending time with your buddy with the bunny rabbit, and start playing with your friend with the kitty cat all the time, then maybe they’ll be your special person and soon enough you’ll see a little kitty on your skin! Isn’t that fun?”

“Don’t worry if you all find this a bit confusing and grown-up. For now, most of your will have your mommy or daddy as your soulmate. Then when you get a little older, maybe it will be your best friend. And then one day, when you’re all grown up, it will be the person you want to be a mommy or daddy with! Oh, it’s just all so lovely!”

“Now well done everyone for having sat there and paying attention for so long. Please stand up, form a line, and one by one you can have a lollipop for being such obedient little boys and girls.”

When the class were let out for recess a few minutes later, all of them were chattering excitedly, and not just about the lollipops. Even Richie and Stan had been won round to what Mrs Butterfly had been saying, and couldn’t wait to find out who their special person would be. Eddie hadn’t been allowed to have a lollipop, he had a note from his mom saying so, but thought the idea of having both a soulmate somewhere out there and a mystery to solve was every bit as cool as a lollipop, even if it was strawberry.

As they walked home together from school later, Richie had flung his arm around the smaller boy’s shoulders, and loudly declared that he hoped that _his Eds would be his soulmate, because his Eds was the best_, which made Eddie smile but also roll his head around on his shoulders (he’d been trying to learn to roll his eyes like Stan, but hadn’t quite mastered it yet). Sure he liked Richie, he was fun and funny, but he was also loud and dirty and irr-es-ponsible, and someone like that could _never_ be his soulmate. He hoped his mom was his soulmate like Mrs Buttferly had said, because she was the one who always took care of him, and made sure he took his medicine no matter what.

So when a few minutes later Eddie had arrived back at home and found his mom sitting there on the porch waiting for him, and asked him what he’d learnt today, and he’d spouted off everything the nice lady had told him, she grinned that large grin that reminded Eddie of the green man who hated Christmas in that funny cartoon, and proudly pulled up her sleeve to reveal a little black aspirator on her pudgy upper arm. Her son gasped with delight and felt a tingle on his wrist, and looked down to see that a perfect drawing of a little pill bottle had appeared there. He couldn’t be happier and he bounced up and down with glee.

His mommy was his soulmate, and she was going to take care of him forever and ever.

But as time marches insistently on, some of this joy begins to drip away like virgin snow turning to dirty slush, until Eddie is left as a rather discontented little detective. It all seems a little easy really, not the tricky thorny puzzle quest that simpering woman had told them in kindergarten. Also, there’s the fact that the number of kids in their grade who still have their mommies or daddies as soulmates is dwindling day by day, leaving poor Eddie as an increasingly rare specimen (Richie has taken to examining him with a large magnifying glass and declaring him the find of the century). Bill has been saying that Georgie became his soulmate on the day he was born, and his mark is now a little paper boat. But the thing is that Eddie’s never actually _seen_ this alleged paper boat that Bill is so fond of, nor the matching one that Georgie has apparently has right where his arm joins his shoulder, even though three-year old Georgie seemed to spend every moment of every day running naked around the Denbrough home while Bill chases weariedly and affectionally after him. Bill could be lying of course, but that’s not really something Bill has ever done before, the leader of their little group has always been unflinchingly honest (kinda to the point of rudeness to be honest, but the Losers love him anyway).

Richie meanwhile, from the moment he enters middle school, can’t stop talking about ‘hot babes’ in a drawling voice that he calls his _chick magnet_ voice (which Eddie secretly refers to as the _pubescent douchebag_ persona), and how each and every one of these supposed hotties is allegedly his new soulmate. He somehow manages to find a new candidate found each week. Eddie can’t really see why all these random high school girls, Sigourney Weaver, Princess Leia and the Queen of England would ever be Richie’s soulmate, but if they are then Richie’s mark should be changing so fast it would practically strobe and be pretty damn noticeable, but he’s never noticed a damn thing.

Finally, there is the fact that, well…Eddie isn’t sure he wants him mom as a soulmate anymore. Sure, he feels rather guilty about this, after all his mom is the one who keeps him safe, who protects him from all the dangers of the outside world. Though sometimes, when he sees Bill fall off his bike and scrape his leg and just shrug it off or Stan roll around in the grass without erupting in hives, he can’t help but wonder when these dangers are actually going to turn up. Being cared for is nice and everything, but does he really need _that_ much care? He feels like a piece of toast whom Sonia is buttering over and over again, slapping spread down without pause. “No!” says toast-Eddie, “please don’t butter me too much momma!”, but still she scrapes scrapes scrapes away with her butter knife, till eventually his wheaty frame collapses from the weight and he falls to the floor with a crumbly splat. When he awakens from his fever dream, sweaty and disorientated (Sonia had put three hot water bottles down his pyjama top while he slept), he looks down at his wrist and sees the pill bottle blink out of existence for a few seconds, before returning with a guilty pang. From that day onwards he keeps a diary of his soulmark’s disappearances, and carefully notes the growing frequency of its absence.

This all rather comes to a head when Eddie is 13, and the school, having acknowledged their students’ – cringe - _developing bodies_ and the way they are – ugh - _blossoming_, decides that they need some rather more age-appropriate information on soulmates. In what must be the most rational decision anyone at Derry Middle has ever made, they decided to bring in a half-decent teacher for this (someone from out of town in other words) and so Eddie, Richie, Bill, Stan, the new kids Bev and Ben and even the homeschool kid Mike who has been brought in specially for this lesson, find themselves sitting in front of Mrs R.D, a short-haired woman in her late 20s who lounges on the desk and gives the class a depressingly frank look.

“So here’s the thing everyone. Soulmates and soulmarks and the whole hullaballoo are a combination of good and bad at the end of the day. First the good. If you don’t actually like the person you think is your soulmate they’re not your freaking soulmate, okay?” The pill bottle disappears instantly, never to be seen again. “You never have to be stuck with someone if you don’t want to be. Remember that.”

“That’s it for the good points really.” The kids exchange alarmed looks. “Well, that and like gallons of happiness if you actually find one another I suppose,” she continues, which placates the class. A little.

“However, the big-ass downside is the fact that it’s really damn hard to know for sure. You might like someone a whole lot and be convinced they’re the one you’re supposed to spend the rest of your life with, but it sure as hell doesn’t mean they necessarily think the same. If you think someone is your soulmate, and your mark reflects that, then this person is known as your Potential.”

“Everyone keeping up?” she checks briefly before plunging on. “The plus point is that only two people can see your mark, so if your Potential is someone embarrassing, like Nancy Reagan or something, you don’t need to worry too much about everyone finding out. But, and this is a big but,” (Richie giggles at this) “is that the only other person who can see the mark is your Potential. So if you ever meet the First Lady, watch out.”

Now, for some of you, whose mark is somewhere visible, this can be pretty tricky to hide if you don’t want your Potential to know how you feel about them. Others are more lucky. Mine is on my forehead for instance, whereas my wife’s is on her left nipple for some reason.”

Everyone in the class stares at her in horror at that point because staring at them right in the face is…”Relax everyone, I know you can see the two rings on my forehead. That’s because me and the missus are ‘Bonded Soulmates’, so everyone can see the marks, okay? Look, kid, stop banging your head against the desk, I told you this shit was complicated.” Ben stops, but still looks at her pleadingly.

“The way you become bonded is by telling your Potential, the Potential that you are absolutely sure and hopefully right about, that they’re your soulmate and giving them a smooch. If you’re not actually their soulmate however…basically your mark literally burns off your skin. Hurts like hell, worse than anything you’ve ever felt before. If you’re both one another’s soulmate however, well it still burns off and hurts like hell but you both get brand new matching soulmarks. Plus happiness and shit I guess.”

“Yeah that’s right. It hurts if it works out, it hurts if it doesn’t. Welcome to _love_ kids. It sucks.”

This time when the kids streamed out of the classroom, they were chattering even more incessantly than last time, voices of excitement, trepidation, confusion and despair ringing through the hallway. Eddie though said nothing. He was too busy being pissed to bother with words. He was more furious than he’d ever been in his life, and he stalked out the room glaring at the floor like it had murdered his puppy and trembling with fury. Mom had lied to him, she’d told him she _had_ to be his soulmate, that he had no choice in the matter and should be happy to have her anyway, because who else would want him, but _none_ of that was true. Freedom had never tasted so bitter though, and the boy knew he had to do something before his anger erupted from his chest like an ambitious hernia. Ignoring the cries of “Eds!”, “Eddie!” and “We still actually have another three-and-a-half hours of school left!” from Richie, Bill and Ben behind him, he turned around and sprinted out of the building.

By the time he arrived home twenty minutes later he was gasping for breath, his head was spinning and his vision was blurry. No matter. Oxygen was overrated, he had pure rage to fuel him. When Eddie burst into the sitting room where his mother was, inevitably, plopped in front of the TV inhaling soap operas, the words that he’d been bottling up for years, every annoyance, grievance, surreptitious suspicion and lingering accusation burst forth from him in a tumbling, trembling tide. Words spilled over one another, sentences would run together, stutter, restart and go off in a whole new direction as thirteen solid years of resentment was unleashed upon his mother who could only sit there and stare gapingly at her son. When Eddie’s words eventually dissolved into nothing more than tearful repeated exhaustions that “You’re not my soulmate, you’re not, you’re not”, her wide eyes squeezed tighter and switched from staring to darting furtively around the room.

“And this -!” Eddie cried, jabbing his finger accusingly at the inhaler on her arm. “This is a joke!” _it must be_ he thought, _I can’t be her Potential, I just can’t_. His Dad has to have been her Potential surely, perhaps even her his, because Frank – barely-remembered, eulogised, perfect Frank – must have been, he just had to have been. He jabbed his accusatory digit forth once more, more words of fury breeding on his tongue like rabbits, and this time he hit her pudgy flesh and his finger slipped on her sweaty upper arm.

And the inhaler smudged. 

It fucking smudged. Eddie’s couldn’t breathe as he stared at the ink staining his trembling finger, before turning and leaving without a further word, ignoring the desperate pleas behind him as he ran to his room and wept. 

It was three days before Eddie emerged from his bedroom, three days of emotional processing, door-muffled maternal wailing and some pretty major soul searching. When he was finally ready he was filled with both the elation and trepidation that comes from new-found freedom, and he was burdened with an overwhelming sense of _mission_. The delusion he had been labouring over for the past eight years was a lie, and now he had to find a new Potential, a better one, preferably one that might even match with him back.

But who in seven hells could it be? After so long of believing he was shackled to a terribly whiny, fussy fate it was incredibly intimidating to be dumped out unbound into the world and left by himself to find a someone. Of course there was _that_someone..

But…

No. Don’t be stupid.

So faced with an absence of ideas (or at least non-stupid ideas), Eddie turned to the most logical possible candidate he could think of: Bev Marsh, the coolest person Eddie knew. Which admittedly wasn’t really a hard title to claim considering he friends literally called themselves the Losers’ Club, but still, there was no dying that the redhead was pretty badass. He’d never quite understood the full-on obsessions that Bill and Ben had with her, or why all the boys had stared in such an enraptured fashion that time down at the quarry, like she’d jabbed fishhooks into their eyelids. She certainly was pretty of course, Eddie wasn’t blind after all, and she did have a good, um, shape? Form? Figure? Was that what you were supposed to say? The boy simply chalked up his earlier bewildered disinterest to his delusion that Sonia was his Potential. Now that his mind was clear, everything would fall into place and some sort of Bev-related image would appear on his wrist any moment now.

So one phone call, one quiet scramble out of his bedroom window to avoid a tangle with his mother and one twenty-minute bike ride later, Eddie met Bev down at the Barrens. She had arrived before him and was sat there, facing away from him, legs dangling over the edge, smoking a cigarette and staring out with a peaceful, far-off look in her eye. She was beautiful and intimidating and enigmatic.

Eddie didn’t have the faintest idea what to do. How do you talk to, like, a girl girl? How do you approach a Potential who isn’t a quivering blob of matriarchal mollycoddling? Nothing in his life had prepared him for this. Desperately he cast around in his mind to try and think what he’d seen others do. The first idea he chanced upon was the way Richie always talked to girls (or said how he talked to girls at least).

Spreading his feet wider and bowing his legs like a cowboy, Eddie slouched his way towards her and flopped down onto the floor like he didn’t care about anything in the world because he was just so many cool tiers above caring. He turned towards Bev, placed a hand on her shoulder like he was about to depart some great fatherly wisdom, and said, in the deepest voice he could muster, “Hey.”

Bev stared at him like he’d grown a dozen extra heads and then asked to borrow her kidney. He wasn’t sure if this was a good sign or not.

“You look really hot babe,” he continued in his bass rumble, “your body is so, er,” _shit, I just used ‘hot’, need to say something else, what the hell else is like hot? Smoking? Flaming? Smouldering?_ “your body is so…steaming.”

Bev burst out laughing. This was almost certainly not a good sign.

“Eddie, that was brilliant!”, she wheezed out between her guffaws. “Really great impression, your Voices might be better than his.”

Okay, take two then. He was going to use the Ben approach, and poet her into being his Potential.

“What I mean to say was,” Eddie said in his normal voice, “was that your skin is beautiful like a... meadow.” _Not too bad, keep it going_. “Your ears are deep like pits. Your elbows are pointy like, um, a pointy…stick.”

Bev had tears in her eyes. If they weren’t from laughing so hard, they might have been a sign of success.

He had no choice but to resort to the final roll of the die, and take the method that Bill had advised him to try with a girl, one that he claimed a 100% success rate – just kiss her.

Eddie fixed Bev with the most serious look he possibly could, his eyes wide and passionate and deep (he actually looked like a startled bushbaby, but he wasn’t to know that). He cupped her face in one hand, closed his eyes and dove his lips towards her (rammed his face forwards her blindly). 

This was it. This was going to be the moment. His lips were so near hers he felt…nothing. Nothing but air. In fact he felt nothing but air not only in front of him, but below him as well. He opened his eyes and saw not Bev staring rapturously at him, but instead blue ripples approaching him at a remarkable pace. 

It would seem that Bev had in fact moved out of the way of his lunging limpet kiss and he was now plunging headfirst into the water below.

His shrill “Shiiiittttt!!!!” was matched only in volume by the splosh of his entry and the pearl of Bev’s laughter.

As she helped the drowned little mouse out from the lake, and walked him sputtering back up to the cliff, her laughter died down and, perhaps sensing his abject humiliation, let him wallow in respectful silence for a few minutes, before finally asking “Eddie, were you – were you trying to see if we were Potentials?”

“Yeah” he said miserably.

“And?”

He checked his wrist. Blank.

“I’m flattered Eddie I really am,” she continued. “But I don’t think we’re really supposed to be together like that.” Eddie shrugged helplessly. “I get it though. No really I do,” she urged in response to his sceptical look.

“It sucks doesn’t it? Thinking you’re going to be stuck with a parent like that as a soulmate for the rest of your life. I’d want to do anything to get away as well.”

And with that, Eddie’s embarrassment vanished to be replaced by commiseration. He laid his hand on hers and together they looked out over the water. After a few minutes, conversation started back up again in dribs and drabs, some sincere, some meaningless. They laughed, chatted and gossiped. He put his head on her shoulder. She shared a cigarette with him, and he coughed only a little (a lot).

From then on Beverly Marsh was forever one of his best friends but decidedly **not** his soulmate.

Neither was it likely to be any girl really, a truth that scared Eddie a lot less than he expected it would, no matter how much it was likely to terrify his mother and a large proportion of Derry’s population. What was genuinely petrifying was the truth that appeared that night, as Eddie lay on his bed staring up at the ceiling and wondering who his next potential Potential could possibly be, for this truth appeared on his wrist in the form of a pair of large, clunky coke-bottle glasses with tape around the middle.

_No. No this couldn’t be. Not him goddamit._

The glasses flickered in and out of existence.

_No I’m not letting this happen, I can choose not to have this right? So NO_

Eddie’s wrist is mercifully blank once more and he lets out a sigh of relief.

It’s not that he dislikes Richie of course, quite the opposite. The Trashmouth is probably his absolutist, favouritest bestest friend of them all (don’t tell the others). He’s been drawn to him ever since the day they met, playing, bickering and adventuring together for years, and if Eddie is honest with himself then he knows perfectly well that there’s been more than a little third-grade pigtail-pulling to the way he teases the taller boy on a near constant basis. But soulmates? Nothing could be further from the truth. Richie is too loud, too crude, he’s never capable of being serious, always goes on and on about sex even though Eddie is pretty sure Richie’s never come anywhere near anyone’s genitals ever, his clothes are hideous, his hygiene is questionable, he never shuts up, and he’s always wearing those stupid ugly glasses.

Glasses. Shit. They’re back.

So maybe a little bit of Eddie does want Richie to be his soulmate.

So what? _It’s not like the feeling is ever going to be mutual_ he thinks, once more willing the unwanted mark away. Over the past couple of months Richie has added _ripped dudes_ to his ever-changing list of soulmates, and while Eddie could maybe be considered a _dude_ in a pinch, _ripped_ was hardly the sort of epithet one would apply to the tiny boy. Richie Tozier, dorky Trashmouth extraordinaire, clearly has intentions of becoming suave playboy extraordinaire, and it didn’t seem like a wheezy little friend would entirely fit into those plans, and Eddie was damned if he was going to resign himself to spending the rest of his life as an unrequited soulmate.

Therefore, when Eddie wakes up the following morning to be greeted by the same lame pair of glasses staring mockingly at him from his wrist, he is unconcerned, for he has a plan. Step one – always wear a wristband. Out of sight out of mind and all that, and more importantly, out of Richie’s sight and mind. When he gets to school he’s slightly surprised to find he’s not the only person who had this idea – half the kids in their year are wearing some sort of concealer, whether it be long sleeves, a scarf, a set of legwarmers or a pair of mittens. One boy is even wearing a thick woollen balaclava, and doesn’t take it off for the rest of high school, seemingly believing that looking like a member of the IRA is a happy trade-off for hiding his shameful secret. 

The second part of the plan is even simpler – Bill. 

Big, beautiful Bill. His oldest friend, and one-time crush when he was ten years old. The leader of their little gang, probably the bravest of them all and a boy with skin as smooth as a waxed and sandpapered baby. Best of all, he’s actually available as a Potential, as he confesses in a stuttered whisper that day that ever since Mrs R.D’s lesson, he’s been able to drop having Georgie as his soulmate, much to his guilty relief. “D-don’t get me wrong or anything,” he says, “I l-l-love him and everything, but now that he’s a t-tween, he’s a right ann-annoying little shit at times.”

Bill could be a great soulmate, and BillandEddie could be the – well, not the Dynamic Duo as such because Richie had declared that Richie-and-Eddie would forever be that when they were nine years old, but still they could be the, um, Terrific Twosome or something right? So when Eddie got home that night and pulled off his wristband to reveal a tiny little bicycle, with the letters S I L V E R just discernible on the side of it when he peered at it through his magnifying glass, he couldn’t help but let out a delighted whoop.

For the next two years, that’s pretty much how Eddie’s life proceeds. He still hung out with all the Losers, as a group and one-on-one and plenty of time shooting the proverbial shit with Richie in particular. But much of his daily routine was spent latched onto Bill, following him around, and acting, if not exactly like a lost puppy, then at least like some sort of misplaced kitten. Because Bill was his Potential and could be well be his actual soulmate. He COULD be. He WILL be, because determination is the name of the game and Eddie Kaspbrak has spades of game. It doesn’t hurt that as adolescence continued its invariably jagged march onwards, Richie grew lankier and awkwarder, with a voice that bounced up and down in pitch at least three times an hour, and a face frequently festooned with surges of acne and an upper lip covered in some stubbornly fuzzy fluff. Bill’s skin remains smooth and unblemished however, his body lengthening and deepening elegantly and smoothly. Yes, Bill totally <strike>could</strike> will be his soulmate.

What admittedly doesn’t help matters are the dirty great spanners that Richie keeps throwing into the works by in his utterly infuriating habit of being Richie. Whenever his jokes tug a smile out of Eddie’s resolute frown, when he kisses him on the cheek and those times when Eddie feels his lungs tighten and invisible fingers pinch his windpipe closed before a large hand will thrust an aspirator out of Richie’s pocket and into Eddie’s grasp – those are the times that Eddie will feel a tingle on his wrist and know that he if were to peel back the wristband he would be met by a familiar pair of glasses peering back at him. Every evening too Richie wrecks his plan because, no matter how awkward he grows, he still invariably appears during Eddie’s scheduled nightly, um ‘activity’. Eddie will be there, chanting to himself ‘Bill, Bill, Bill, Big Bill, Bill’s dick, dick is short for Richard, Richard is long for Richie, Richie, Richie’s dick…goddamnit!’

The plan, and two whole years of wasted effort, comes crashing down one day down at the quarry (aka the Cursed Soulmate Place That Ruins Eddie’s Plans). It had naturally occurred to Eddie that he’d never actually seen a mark on Bill anywhere, and the possibility that this meant Bill wasn’t ever going to see him as a Potential was, hypothetically, only a very minor obstacle. Very minor. Not major at all. ‘Catastrophic’ is right out. After all, maybe Bill’s mark was just somewhere hidden to the everyday eye. Eddie was sure that was it. Even when they were all swimming and just wearing their boxers (having thankfully abandoned the tighty-whiteys the year before) and there still wasn’t _anything_ on view, well that didn’t mean a thing. Nothing at all. And if his eyes kept straying to Richie’s weird, angular body that also didn’t mean diddly squat. But then the fateful moment rudely arrived when Richie pantsed Bill and Eddie was faced with three crushing disappointments.

Firstly, was disappointment in himself, in that he shamefully thought it was really funny.

Secondly, was the disappointment that Big Bill did not actually live up to his nickname after all.

Thirdly, was the fact that despite literally every inch of skin being on view for inspection, it was all bleached clean and soulmark free. 

As he stared and stared, Eddie didn’t know what to feel, but the tingle on his wrist let him know the glasses were haunting him once more.

The very next day at school, six of the seven Losers were eating lunch together, five of whom were chatting happily while Eddie sat in silence, morosely ploughing his way through a mountain of mac and cheese. His brooding was interrupted by a great sputtering choking sound as Ben’s Sloppy Joe evidentially tried to escape from his slack-jawed mouth. Eddie turned to see exactly what Ben was staring at with platter-sized eyes, and spotted Bev walking towards their lunch table, looking somewhat concerned at the Heimlich-starved boy and sporting a new, much shorter haircut. While Eddie wasn’t exactly Bev’s target audience, he could admit that she certainly looked good, and obviously he and everyone else on planet Earth knew about Ben’s thing for her, but he still couldn’t entirely understand why Ben was slowly raising a quivering finger and pointing at her like he was about to accuse of her being a witch before all the townspeople.

Then however, Ben managed to wheeze out the words “Jan-January embers!” and Bev’s eyes grew as wide as his and her skin as red as her hair, and she grabbed Ben by his wobbly finger and forcibly dragged the huffing boy to the janitor’s closet and shut the door behind them. After five minutes of increasingly lewd speculation from Richie about what exactly they were doing in there, they emerged hand-in-hand and grinning from ear-to-ear and showing off their two matching marks, the words _January embers_ in neat black script on Bev’s neck and on Ben’s, now only-moderately-pudgy, belly.

Poor Bill meanwhile looks utterly distraught for the rest of the week, before apparently coming to terms with it somewhere around his fifth drink that Friday night as they celebrate the new couple, and spends the rest of high school making the moves on basically every woman he comes across.

It’s at this self-same party when Eddie sways his way out of the Denbrough’s living room and onto the porch where he finds Richie sat on the wall, gazing out and smoking. He looks almost ethereal in the drunken moonlight. He jumps when Eddie lays a hand on his shoulder and hoists himself up onto the wall next to him, the shock on his face dissolving into a familiar smirk when the smaller boy boldly takes the cigarette from his hand and takes a large drag himself (and then utterly fails to conceal his coughing fit). 

“Big week huh?” Eddie inquires.

“That it was, my little Spaghetti,” Richie says back. “Almost as big as my – “

“Beep-beep Richie” Eddie cuts him off with, which earns him an affectionate chuckle. 

They sit for a few minutes in what Eddie hopes is companionable stillness, but increasingly it feels like painful silence. Because the Three Bs have just settled their great soulmate drama at last, and Eddie has lost his third Potential in a row and is sitting right next to his cursed Potential and Richie is still refusing to just read his mind already and say something serious about soulmates like Eddie wants him to.

Eventually the pressure grows too great and he hesitantly asks, “Richie, do you know who your Potential is?”

“Of course I do,” Richie replies in a sad solemn tone that Eddie has only ever heard a handful of times before.

“Then why don’t you…you know? Do something about it?”

“Because they don’t want to be Potentials back,” Richie says matter-of-factly, his eyes not meeting Eddie’s.

“But why not? How do you know?”

“Because Eddie,” he turns to look directly at him, shadows clouding his face. He swallows heavily, and slowly raises a shaking hand to place it on top of Eddie’s, before leaning forward and whispering directly in his ear, “they’re too intimidated by the size of my wang.”

Eddie squawks and shoves Richie, who tumbles off the side and lands in the Denbrough’s rose bushes below, limbs flailing in the air like a beetle (though somehow managing to keep his beer perfectly upright). Giggles erupt from the both of them into the night sky, and the rest of the evening proceeds as messily and enjoyably as normal.

It is only later, curled up in his sleeping bag and watching the sleeping Tozier boy through eyes heavy with fatigue, that Eddie thinks back to their earlier interaction. Why has Richie never looked for his soulmate? He never talks about it, he never does anything about it he just… and while Richie’s alcohol-fuelled moods have always been liable to changing on a dime, nevertheless…

No. Nevertheless nothing. 

Dwelling on what you don’t have is a fool’s errand.

Eddie is now left in the unfortunate position of running out of potential Potentials. With Richie and the Bs now off the list, he’s not entirely sure who the next candidate could be. Obviously it _has_ to be one of the Losers, because they’re literally the only people on the planet he actually likes, and realistically, have a chance of liking him back.

Mike Hanlon is wonderful boy who makes Eddie feel safe and warm, when he takes his shirt off and starts lifting hay bales, makes the bottom fall out of Eddie’s stomach, but for some reason he just doesn’t feel like soulmate material. Eddie loves him, but he doesn’t _love_ him, and he knows he’s not a Potential.

Stanley Uris meanwhile – he could be a fine candidate. He’s pretty, and smart, and sensible and even cleaner and neater than Eddie. The sort of boy one would dream of taking home to meet the parents. Not that Eddie would ever actually do it with his mom, but you know, he’d take him to meet some hypothetical parents (Greg and Amanda, and their black labrador, Snowy). Surely Stan would be perfect. So with just a little effort, Eddie makes a small sparrow appear on his wrist.

The next year continues much as the previous one did, but now with Bill’s role played by Stan. It’s a lot harder than it used to be, and only the force of Eddie’s endless determination carries him through the next twelve months. For one, Richie seems to grow into his sixteenth year with more grace than he’s ever possessed before. He now fits his limbs, his torso fills out just right, his skin clears up and his cheekbones threaten to cut anyone who comes near. He gets new, smarter, thinner and glasses that don’t even have a single piece of tape on them. The first time Eddie sees them he’s drinking a bottle of water, and he promptly inhales half of it, snorts half of it again out of his nose and makes a noise like wounded buffalo and run to the bathroom to check on his wrist tingles. Sure enough, when he peels off the wristband he sees Richie’s brand new sexy glasses staring back at him. It takes a full ten minutes of him angrily whispering into his forearm for the sparrow to make a re-appearance.

The other problem is that time with Stan is, well, nice. Like it’s good that it’s nice, nice is fine, nice is…nice. There are a lot of plus points to having Stan as a Potential for certain. His deadpan snark gels perfectly with Eddie’s biting banter, and there are times when the curly-haired boy sends Eddie into hysterics. But…well…these times seem carefully chosen whereas hanging around with Richie means the laughs come thick and crude (_Much like my penis_ Richie adds in Eddie’s mind). Stan and Eddie have a lot in common with their shared anxiety, and talking about their differing flavours of it one another can sometimes be pretty damn therapeutic, but at other times they just end up setting one another off and spiralling down into a nerve-induced pit of panic snakes. Whereas a certain anonymous trash-talking friend of his could calm Eddie down and pull him out of crash landing with apparent ease. Not that Eddie is thinking about this nameless person, because of course he’s not. Sparrow sparrow sparrow. And if he does have more fun with [redacted] then so what? There’s more to life than fun surely? Time spent walking the woods and birdwatching with Stan is…

It’s sort of….

It’s…nice. It’s _nice_.

God, birds are boring though. 

Like, they never do anything interesting AT ALL. Sitting on a branch and then flying to another branch 47 times an hour is not exactly fascinating is it? Oh what’s that Stan, this one has a longer beak does it? A slightly different shade of brown you say? How fucking intriguing, I never would have guessed that. And is it going to do something different in our third hour of watching it today? No, it’s just going to preen itself _again_ is it? Oh, never mind, this is nice isn’t? Nice nice nice.

That’s what he chants to himself as he walks back home, _nice nice sparrow nice sparrow sparrow nice_, over and over again, a desperate refrain that, no matter how many times he recites it, still fails to get that shitty pair of sexy glasses from out behind his wrist band. _It’s not fair_, he thinks bitterly as he turns to walk up the driveway and around the back of his house, _how exactly is he supposed to keep his skin spectacle-free when Richie is there being nice as well as funny, and sweet, and tall, and handsome, and his best fucking friend in this whole stinking town? Is this somehow my fault?_ he angrily asks himself for the hundredth time as he tugs open the bedroom window and hoists himself up onto the ledge, _no of course not, because you know who’s fault it is?_ “Richie fucking Tozier!” he snaps out loud.

A surprisingly high-pitched yelp startles him and he tumbles off the ledge onto his bedroom floor. He looks up to find the self-same Richie staring down at him bug-eyed, headphones hanging off his head and holding a up a half-eaten pack of Oreos like a weapon. 

“Jesus Eds, you scared the shit out of me!” Richie exclaims.

Richie. Standing there in Richie’s room, looking down at Eddie who is lying there on Richie’s floor. 

How on earth did he get here?

Oh right, angry muttering that’s how. No time to dwell on that now though, he’s much too fired up. 

“It’s your fault!” he points accusingly with one hand, pushing himself up to a standing position with the other. 

“Eddie, what did I – “

“Do you have any idea just how frustrating it is, to spend so much time looking for your soulmate, to put so much bloody effort into this maddening quest, only to see your best friend not doing anything at all themselves? Just making no effort whatsoever, like it doesn’t even fucking matter? Because I think it matters!”

“But Eddie – “ Richie says pleadingly.

“I’ve tried to make it so hard with these people!” Eddie ploughs on undeterred, like a madman with a snowplow. “Every one of them is awesome, all of them would make perfect soulmates, but I just can’t make it goddamn WORK! And while I’m there asking myself why, asking if this is my fault somehow, wondering what’s wrong with me, you’re just sitting there like you expect the universe to just plonk them down in your lap one day without you having to lift a damn finger!”

“Eds, I – “ Richie says, looking guilty. 

“And when I ask you why you’re like this, what shitty, pitiful excuses do you come up with? That you already know who your soulmate is, but they don’t want you? That’s bullshit and you know it!”

“It’s not bullshit Eddie. They really don’t want – “ Richie begins to say morosely before invariably being cut off once more.

“Of course it’s bullshit! You couldn’t have more bullshit if you gave a heifer a freaking laxative! Look at yourself, are you really telling me that – “

“Yes I am okay?” This time Richie gets to interrupt Eddie, saying bitterly “they’ve made it pretty clear they have no interest.”

“Oh really? Then who is it? Who on earth is magically too good for you? Because I don’t believe you at all, I think your telling me such utter – “

“Goddamnit, FINE!” Richie suddenly roars, more angry then Eddie has seen him in years and Eddie is cowed into a shamefaced silence. “You want to know do you Eddie? You really want to know? Well, here you go!”

Richie unbuckles his belt, pops open the button on his jeans and tugs down his flies.

“Richie what the everloving fuck are you – “

Richie turns his back on him, pulls down his pants and boxers, bends over and moons him.

Once again, Eddie has to face three sudden revelations in quick succession.

Firstly, is that unexpected nudity just isn’t that funny this time.

Secondly, is the fact that Richie’s ass is a lot nicer than he predicted. Like, he would have expected a scrawny little thing, but no, this has, like, tone and everything. He could honestly spend a lot more time describing it in detail if it weren’t for the third, rather distracting, revelation.

Because there, right on his (again, surprisingly firm) right butt cheek are the letters

L O<strike> S </strike>V E R in black print, with red replacing the S with a V.

All the rage, all the frustration, all the pent-up little aggravation that has been building up for years has vanished. All those endless words that were spilling uncontrolled out of his mouth have been scooped right out of him. All that is left echoing around his hollow brain are the phrases _I know that mark!_ and _nice ass_.

His catatonic reverie is interrupted by Richie standing back up straight, whirling around and taking the rant-bat right out of Eddie’s hands. “So do you see why I never try and find my Potential Eds? Of course not! Because I’ve known who they are since I was bloody twelve years old that’s why! Ever since you broke your arm and your demon mother dragged you away to some sort of cotton-woollen hell for a week, and I was so desperate to see you but she never let me, and then finally I see the only jailbreak you’ve been allowed is to the pharmacy, and you walk out onto the street and I’m so freaking happy and I don’t even know why, but then you look so miserable, staring down at what that cunt Greta wrote on your cast, and I’m so damn sad and I have no idea what to do, just that I need to do something, and then you pull this red marker pen out of your fanny pack – your fanny packs Eds! – and you change the S to a V and you just smile this little determined, fuck-you-Greta smile, and I swear at that point my ass didn’t just tingle, it fucking vibrated liked your mother’s favourite toy, and I ran home right then, I peel down my pants and what do you think I see? Something that clearly you’re never going to see, but there is my butt mark, right there!”

Richie takes a brief, but desperate, pause for breath. His passionate speech, complete with wild gestures and furious emotions, would be very impressive if it weren’t for the fact that he still hasn’t pulled his pants back up, and is standing there with his jeans and boxers pooled around his gorilla slippers, only an oversized Nirvana t-shirt covering his modesty.

Eddie thinks he looks beautiful.

Apparently he isn’t done though. “Of course Sonia still has her podgy claws in you, so I can’t do anything at all about this, but then that lesson happens and you just looks so mad, and I’m proud of you, I want to help you but I know I can’t and I don’t see you for three whole, agonising days, but I can’t help but think maybe, you know, just maybe, that me and emancipated you will be Potentials together and I can’t fucking wait to see you!”

Eddie knows he should be interjecting here, but it seems his nervous system has been rendered quite incapable.

“But then I hear that you tried to see if Bev was your Potential! I mean I get it of course, Bev’s a bitchin’ badass, but it hurts you see, and it hurts that it hurts because I have no right to you or anything. But then you spend so long hanging off Bill like a parasitic puppy, and then one day you apparently decide to abandon that and I hope again, I can’t well stop myself by this point, but no! One week later you’ve latched yourself onto Stan!”

Richie pulls his glasses off his face and begins to rub his eyes.

“I can’t blame you obvously! Staniel and Billiam are both, just, so much…better than me. But it just keeps driving it home over and over again, how it’s never going to be, that you’re going to consider everyone in the Losers Club and maybe the whole damn world before you ever see me as a Potential…but every night, I check and there it is, still staring at me in the mirror, chanting ‘never going to happen, not good enough, not…’

Richie begins to cry. And no matter how confused and overwhelmed and paralysed Eddie is feeling right now, Richie’s tears are something he cannot stand. He peels the wristband off, in front of someone else for the first time since he first put it on all those years ago.

“Chee – look.”

Richie wipes his eyes, glances at Eddie and lets out a resentful “What? It’s your arm.”

Eddie growls in frustration before marching over to Richie, snatching the glasses from his hand and jamming the glasses messily onto his face and waggling his wrist in front of them.

“I’ve been seeing these glasses every day since that lesson. I thought it was just the universe playing another sick joke the way it did with my mother, because there’s no way you’d ever want to match with me. I tried so hard to get this damn mark to show something else, but it just kept turning back into this no matter what I did because – “

“- I’m your Potential.” Richie finishes the sentence with a look on his face that seems torn between delight and disbelief. He shuffles even closer to Eddie and peers at his wrist like he’s daring it to disappear.

“Richie you’re so much more than that to me, you’re…” he doesn’t know what to say, “you’re…”

Fuck words. He kisses him. He kisses him for the first time and for Richie’s first time and it’s clumsy and soft and warm and wet and hot and really hot, like more hot than it really should be, like’s this is quite painful, scratch that it’s really fucking painful. They both pull away and clutch their marks in agony because they’re on fire, they can literally smell the burning, they feel like they’re going to erupt. And then with a sudden excruciating_tear_ the skin on Eddie’s wrist and Richie’s ass shrivels, browns and drops dead to the floor. Beneath is a new layer of skin, pink and fresh with a brand new mark. 

To anyone else they might think the sight is strange, two boys, one tall, one small, one dressed, one with his pants around his ankles, both standing there giggling and kissing. The tall one keeps grabbing the wrist of the other to stare happily at it, while the short one apparently can’t help but peer around the back of the other and hike up their shirt ever few seconds as if to check something is still there. But they don’t care what they looks like, they only care for looking at the thing that makes them happy, the new matching symbol that adorns both their bodies.

_R + E_

**Author's Note:**

> As ever, comments, critiques and criticisms are thoroughly welcomed.


End file.
